—presumably—orders and pick-ups. I can still hear him: "Pickinguppa,
one-ah vealuh Orloffah . . . and three sole Balmoralla. Orderingah,
twenty-three beef Wellingtonna and seventeena chicka for the Belvedera
Suite . . . orderinga three crespelle toscana seg way . . . two a steaka one
a mediuma rare one-a mediuma."
In the middle of 300 à la carte dinners, the cooks were required to crank
out enormous sit-down banquets of fully plated appetizers and entrees
for the private catering rooms. "Pickinguppa five hunnerta beef
Wellingtonna!" and the whole line would break formation, drag long
work tables to the center of the kitchen and re-form as a production line
like you'd expect to see in an automobile assembly plant. Two cooks at
one end of the table would slice and slap, others would pour sauce from
giant, long-spouted coffeepots, and two more would drop vegetables and
garnish. At the other end of the table, a long line of bolero-jacketed
waiters would then clap down silver plate covers, stack the entrees ten or
more at a clip onto serving trays, and ferry them like worker ants to the
distant banquet rooms—only to return a few moments later.
It was, as I've said, hot. Ten minutes into the shift, the cheap polyester
whites we all wore would be soaked through with sweat, clinging to
chest and back. All the cooks' necks and wrists were pink and inflamed
with awful heat rashes; the end-of-shift clothing change in the Room's
fetid, septic locker-rooms was a gruesome panorama of dermatological
curiosities. One saw boils, pimples, ingrown hair, rashes, buboes,
lesions, and skin rot of a severity and variety you'd expect to see in some
jungle backwater. And the smell of thirty not very fastidious cooks—
their sodden work boots and sneakers, armpits, cologne, fungal feet,
rotten breath—and the ambient odor of moldering three-day-old
uniforms, long-forgotten pilfered food stashes hidden in lockers to which
the combination was unknown, all combined to form a noxious,
penetrating cloud that followed you home, and made you smell as if
you'd been rolling around in sheep guts.